“Wait a minute,” Terrell said.
But Frankie paid no attention to him. His young, spoiled face was closed and hard, and his eyes were already fixed on something beyond the room. He moved to the door and reached for the knob.
“Wait a minute,” Terrell said wearily. He didn’t understand his change of heart, but he knew he couldn’t turn this mad dog loose on the city. “Don’t be a sucker, Frankie. You start after Cellars or Rammersky and you’ll get your head blown off.”
“Sure,” Frankie said. “They’re tough guys.”
“I’ve been steaming you up for personal reasons.”
Frankie turned and looked at him then, his hand still on the door knob. “What kind of personal reasons?”
“Cellars picked up Connie Blacker. She came to my apartment last night and that’s where he found her this morning. I wanted him to start worrying so hard about his own skin that he’d forget her. I thought you were the boy to worry him.”
“You want the girl, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re brainy. Using me to save her hide.”
“It’s no good, Frankie.”
“Why not? I’ll worry him plenty. And if I get my head blown off, what difference does it make? You’ll have your girl. I’m a nothing to you. A ginny bastard, wasn’t it? The kind of slug who’d raise a kid to run numbers or work in a burlesque joint.” Frankie was smiling but he sounded very much like a child trying not to weep. “Wasn’t that you talking a few seconds ago?”
“I shouldn’t have,” Terrell said.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know Eden. But we’re tramps to you. Isn’t that right?”
“For Christ’s sake, stop being so emotional. Who am I to judge?”
“Stop being emotional! That’s pretty funny!” Frankie turned away from the door and sat on the edge of the bed. He stared steadily at Terrell for a few seconds. Then: “Are you a Catholic?”
Terrell sighed. “This is relevant, I’ll bet.”
“Well, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You are or you aren’t. You know. One way or the other.”
“Was Jesus of Nazareth Christ Incarnate? Catholics answer yes,” Terrell said. “I’m not sure.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Frankie said irritably, and moved to the door. His young face looked suddenly very tired and old. “I think I’m going to die tonight,” he said.
“You’re doing a good job of talking yourself into it.”
“It’s the way I feel.” Frankie shrugged lightly. “That’s why I’m talking like an oddball. It’s important. You think she was a tramp, eh?”
“I think she loved you,” Terrell said. “She wanted to have your baby. She was no tramp.”
Frankie nodded slowly. “That’s a logical way to look at it. It’s funny that what you thought of her should matter to me. But you may be the last guy I’ll ever talk to about her. So it makes a difference.”
“You’re selling yourself a deal,” Terrell said. “You’ll die all right. You’ll be hit by a truck wandering around asking people about their religion.”
“No, it won’t be that way,” Frankie said. His hand turned the knob slowly and the door opened an inch or so. “You bought yourself an address,” he said. “Bancroft’s nursing home, on Madden Boulevard near the city line. Take it down.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where Ike sent the little blonde,” Frankie said. “You should know how close you came to not getting it. So long now.” He opened the door and slipped quickly into the corridor.
Terrell listened to his heels clicking sharply toward the elevators, and then he picked up the phone and gave the operator Superintendent Duggan’s home number.
The Superintendent’s wife answered, and told him that Duggan had gone back to the office. She sounded upset. “He just dashed away, right in the middle of that TV program he likes so much. It’s the one where—”
Terrell broke the connection and told the operator he wanted the police board. It took him almost five minutes to get through to Duggan. Finally Duggan’s voice cracked in his ear. “Yes? Who is this?”
“Sam Terrell. Listen, I’ve got an address I want you to take down.”
“Sam, you must live under a rock. Don’t you know the whole goddamn city is upside down? We picked up a hoodlum named Rammersky who tells us he strangled Eden Myles. Caldwell’s clear.”
“The Bancroft nursing home,” Terrell said, raising his voice over Duggan’s. “There’s a girl being held there. Connie Blacker.”
“Wait a minute,” Duggan said. “We already got that tip. The Bancroft nursing home. Hang on.”
“What are you talking about?” Terrell yelled, but Duggan was off the line.
He returned a full minute later, and said, “I just checked with Radio. A couple of cars are on their way to pick her up.”
“Where did you get the tip?”
“Mike Karsh called about ten minutes ago. Told us the girl was being held against her will, that she was an important witness against Ike Cellars.”
“When will you know if she’s all right?”
“When the cars report to Radio. Sam, I’m busy as hell.”
“I’ll call you back,” Terrell said, and put the phone slowly back in place. He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. Mike Karsh... He shook his head, completely bewildered.
The time passed slowly. He paced the room, counted Frankie’s suits, read the labels on bottles of patent medicines, and then stared at the cover of a magazine that was lying beside the bed. The illustration was of a kitten peeking around a bowl of geraniums. He studied it for a full minute, irrelevantly aware that this particular conjunction of subjects would probably be distasteful to him the rest of his life.
Five minutes passed. He called Duggan again, and was another couple of minutes getting through to him. Then he said, “Have you got the girl?” His voice was high, and he could feel the uneven lurch of his heart.
“Yes. They’ve taken her over to St. Anne de Beaupré’s and made three arrests at the Bancroft home. It’s a phony joint.”
Terrell’s hand tightened on the phone. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Christ, I don’t know,” Duggan said impatiently. “She’s in bad shape. That’s all they told me.”
19
There were two police cars parked in the gravelled driveway before the accident ward of St. Anne de Beaupré’s hospital. The red emergency light flashed above the wide doorway, and farther down the lane a white ambulance was angled against the receiving ramp.
The patrolmen from the squads were chatting with attendants, while a nurse filled out their forms at the registration desk. As always, the atmosphere was one of casual tension; this was an arena of bright lights and rubber-tiled floors and antiseptic smells, a theatre where the highest tragedies were acted out before nurses, interns and cops — a tough, unimpressionable audience that could watch the drama efficiently and still find time to worry about time-off and coffee-breaks.
Terrell nodded to the patrolmen and said to the nurse, “Connie Blacker. How is she?”
“Admitted,” the nurse said. She looked up at him and smiled quickly. “Hello, Sam. You’re a stranger. She’s under oxygen, I think. She was having some kind of respiratory trouble. What’s the matter? You look pretty rocky yourself.”
“Nothing,” Terrell said. “Where is she?”
“Just down the hall. In Emergency.”
“Thanks,” Terrell said, and turned into the wide white corridor. He knew his way around every hospital in the city; he had sipped coffee in this one, and kidded with nurses while waiting for an accident victim to die, and when it was over he had called the desk with only a momentary and impersonal regret that someone’s life had come to an end.